Tarik's six-month old company, Third Screen Interactive, develops mobile phone applications to help people communicate with large groups. Their first application GrpTXT is used by bars, corporates and a major supermarket chain to run customer promotions via text message.

Tarik is based in Wellington and has advisors and investors dotted around the country. Each is authorised to access different levels of information using Xero.

"Our investors are constantly travelling. They need to be kept informed about our performance – so they log-on to our Xero dashboard and look at our top-line numbers in real-time whenever it suits them. Before Xero, we would have spent time extracting reports that would have been out of date by the time they read them," he says.

It's a similar story when he's working with his business advisors, who routinely log-on to Xero and work with the same set of accounts as Tarik.

"We've been working with a tax advisor who needed to calculate depreciation on our computer hardware. She was able to log-on and grab all the details she needed about the purchase date and price of our hardware and I didn't know anything about it. The alternative would be me spending hours printing reports and sending them," he says.

"Xero's perfect for me. I get all the information that I need, but I get it faster than before, and I'm freed up to run my business not do my books."

www.grptxt.co.nz